Transferring What You Know

Guiding Prompts: You do not need to answer all of the following questions, select those you find useful.

-Now that you are at the end of 39C (and the Lower Division Writing Requirement), take a look back to where you were at the beginning of the quarter, or even at the beginning of your college-writing experience, and analyze how your practices and habits of researching, writing, and organizing have changed and evolved.You might consult your Week 1 Self Assessment to get you started.

-How have your experiences in your writing classes at UCI influenced your personal history as a writer in academic contexts? Has the WR39 series of courses and 39C in particular influenced your ability to make effective choices about how to approach writing assignments in other classes? Assignments such as lab reports, business memos, blue book exams, short response papers, and any other examples of writing you have been assigned in here at UCI? In other words, have you applied what you learned in the WR 39 series to writing assignments in other classes? Have other classes and assignments influenced your writing process; if so, which ones? Please explain using specific examples.

-Are you using a variety of different strategies to approach your writing assignments in all of your classes? Are you using the same strategies in different contexts as you consider the demands of different situations and assignments? If so, please explain such situations and assignments, and give examples.

-Over the course of this quarter, while you were in WR39C, did you bring any of the strategies you were learning in 39C into the other classes you were taking this quarter to help you with writing assignments in these other classes? Please explain, and use examples.

-Did you bring strategies you learned in your other classes this quarter into 39C? Please explain, and use examples.

Your Composing Process

Guiding Prompts: You do not need to answer all of the following questions, select those you find useful.

-Your Writing Process: Describe the central strategies of your writing process. When and how did you learn them? How have they changed over time and what experiences have been most influential to you? How do you expect to use them in WR39C? Explain and use examples.

-Have you experienced moments when the light bulb suddenly illuminated? Can you explain why and how this happened?

-Explain what you have learned about the process of generating a research-based composition.

-What have you learned about arranging the elements of your compositions? Have you become more skillful and able to control your presentation of evidence and integrate various pieces of evidence into a coherent and meaningful argument?

-How did conducting research all throughout the drafting process help you to make decisions about the organizational logic of your compositions? In what ways, specifically, did you formulate and reformulate research strategies, framing questions, and guiding claims/arguments by using research?

-Did you carefully select multimodal pieces of evidence? Why did you choose such examples? Did making your argument visible by using multimodality help you to clarify your thesis?

-Explain how your process of writing drafts, source evaluations, and annotations evolved over the course of the quarter. Did you become more effective at pre-writing tasks?

Rhetoric, Argumentation, & Multi-modal Communication

Guiding Prompts: You do not need to answer all of the following questions, select those you find useful.

-What have you learned about argumentation and persuasion through the process of generating two multi-modal compositions?

-Explain how creating a multi-modal composition helped you to articulate your arguments and understand your ethos as the author.

-How did conducting research all throughout the drafting process help you to make decisions about the organizational logic of your compositions? In what ways, specifically, did you formulate and reformulate research strategies, framing questions, and guiding claims/arguments by using research?

-Did you carefully select multimodal pieces of evidence? Why did you choose such examples? Did making your argument visible by using multimodality help you to clarify your thesis?

-Can you explain how you arrived at the solutions you chose to analyze in your advocacy composition?

-Was there a specific moment when your thesis became clear to you, when the light bulb illuminated, and can you explain what you did to arrive at such a moment of clear insight?

-Did using multimodal elements help you figure out how to arrange your evidence and deliver your argument in a well-put together narrative?

-Explain and demonstrate why and how you used various arguments and counter-arguments and numerous and different sources to strengthen your claims.

1. Revision

Guiding Prompts: You do not need to answer all of the following questions, select those you find useful.

-Explain your process of revision. How big of a role does revision play in your process of generating and discovering arguments?

-Explain how you benefitted from feedback from your teacher and from your peers both in workshops and in office hours. How do you respond to criticism? What sort of critic are you becoming? Use examples of feedback you received on your work-in-progress, your final versions, and in workshops, as well as advice you gave to your peers to address these questions.

-Analyze how you benefit from writing multiple drafts in terms of argumentative presentation, evidentiary support, and narrative development.

-Explain and analyze the types of revisions that benefit you. Do you make broad, conceptual revisions? Do you make structural revisions and reorganize paragraphs? Do you rewrite sentences? Do you make fine word choices? Do you alter your body of evidence through research or omission?

Supporting MaterialsSelections & Selecting

Your portfolio should be populated by numerous artifacts. All of the “process” work you do will generate artifacts; put them into your portfolio as you go along, knowing that you will continue to organize and reorganize it over the course of the quarter. But select the most meaningful artifacts carefully, and write detailed captions for them so that whoever views your ePort understands your reasons for choosing a specific piece of evidence.

Possible Artifacts:

-Examples of your best writing

-“Before-and-After” examples of writing you revised

-Source evaluations and annotations

-Research proposals

-Examples of your writing from other classes in comparison to the writing for your WR 39C course

-Instructor & Peer feedback

-Cellphone pictures of your notetaking strategies, diagrams of your arguments, or other things that represent you and your learning.

-Your source materials: video, pdf files, websites, cartoons, etcetera and so forth

-What else might you select?

Some examples for this assignment:

1. Use “before and after” examples:

One of the basic premises of the ePortfolio assignment is that you’re not the writer and researcher today that you were ten weeks ago when we started. You’ve written two huge papers, done heaps of research, revised tirelessly, and discussed your writing with me along the way. I want to be able to see you account for that change in the reflective introduction, and using a “before and after” model does this beautifully. Pick some artifacts from your early efforts in the HCP and AP processes and then put them next to the improved or completed versions. What changed between the two versions? How were you able to rewrite sentences or add sources or rearrange a structure? What was the mechanism by which the “before” became the “after”? Your task is to make that process as specific and legible to me as possible. Here’s a (very long) example of this type of self-comparison (taken from a previous student’s ePortfolio):

“Among all the writing courses I have taken, Writing 39C steered me to tackle and incorporate counterarguments head on. Before taking this course, I was hesitant about including any counter arguments that could possibly dismantle my own argument. The HCP (Links to an external site.) got me started on thinking about a topic in terms of two opposing sides. When my professor was explaining that the HCP should be dedicated to explaining both sides of the issue – in my case that would be Zero Tolerance Policies versus the low-achieving black and Hispanic students it harmed – I could not grasp how we were supposed to do this. So as a result, I briefly mentioned the motives of school personnel who were in support of ZTP. As you can see, I tried to maneuver my way around further explaining who were the authoritative figures defending these ZTP. It seems as though I was set on criticizing these policies from the beginning.

My professor did recognize that I made a little room for the opposing side, however, I lacked the citation to make “this law had been enacted as a way to protect students from school shootings” more credible. This is another weakness that I had with my argumentation. The image above is one of a handful of places in my HCP where a quotation would be useful in creating an assertive tone.

I took this, an awareness of my lack of counterarguments and necessity for quoting my sources, into my Advocacy Project intending to address my weaknesses. I reintroduced my problem within the first two paragraphs of my AP. Then in third paragraph, when discussing the possible opposition to my solution, I reestablished the motives of teachers, school administrators, and other political figures for keeping zero tolerance policies in their schools. In my AP, I made the appropriate changes with presenting counterarguments adequately and using quotes.”

1. Look at specific words, phrases and sentences you wrote and be able to articulate why you wrote them the way you did. Why did you use those words? How did you achieve that tone? What was your goal in putting that paragraph there?:

This is a chance to talk about the verbal and linguistic choices you made in your writing. What did the authorial voices of your HCP and AP sound like? Were they different? If so, why? How was your tone achieved? This is a great opportunity to highlight three or four sentences/passages and talk about why you wrote them the way you did. Why those words? Why in that order? What’s the connection between these choices and your overall rhetorical purpose?

1. Focus on specific, concrete, individual moments in the quarter:

This is a chance to write a little more “creatively,” to talk about a specific time and place where you had an important moment in your composing process. Was there a moment where you felt you had a breakthrough? When a concept finally made sense? When you wrote a paragraph that really worked? Get super close on this moment. Where were you (literally)? What did it feel like to have this breakthrough, this moment of insight? What clicked? Why? Can you explain to me how you went from stumped, confused, and frustrated one second, to then overcoming those feelings in the next? Here’s an example of what this might sound like:

“I had a big breakthrough when I was reading over the first draft of my AP. I hadn’t looked at it for a couple days and was hoping to come back with some fresh eyes. It was a Tuesday night, I had just eaten a great bowl of mac n’ cheese, and I was honestly a little scared about what I would find. I hoped that my writing was perfect and that I wouldn’t find any issues when I started to revise. But as soon as I started reading, I saw my introduction was really vague, talking about “society” and the “purpose of education,” and I didn’t even mention that the core issue of the essay was about reducing childhood obesity by making school lunches healthier. I realized that, in the past, I thought introductions were about being broad so as to lure your reader in, but I realized now that doing that only frustrates the reader, makes them lose patience and wonder what the “point” of the essay is. With that in mind, I started to retool my introduction to lead with my issue, briefly lay out a couple sentences about the causes of childhood obesity, and then clearly state what my proposed solution was to remedy this problem. In this new version, the reader sees what the paper’s core thesis is within the first five sentences, instead of waiting a whole page for me to get around to it.”

1. Use a variety of different artifacts to show your composing and revising process:

These can be anything: screenshots of drafts; excerpts from emails you exchanged with me or a writing center consultant; pictures of notes or outlines—anything that you helped you in your writing process that you can use as physical evidence of your thinking and progress.

 

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